Yesterday’s keynote from Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA’s CEO, showcased a lot of impressive technology and demos. We encourage you to watch the complete video below to see all the great announcements, but we would like to specifically call out the announcement of the NVIDIA WaveWorks, the real-time Beaufort Scale ocean simulation which was demonstrated during the keynote (the 7:45 mark if you don’t want to wait).

The purpose of this article is to discuss how to incorporate GPU accelerated effects into a project without negatively impacting the overall performance and framerate of a game.
The key to making this work is to run all visual effects independently of the main game thread and rendering pipeline. While the concept is simple, as always, the devil is in the details and there are a lot of things to consider to make this work properly.

Once again, we are just weeks away from another awesome GDC event! We are thrilled to offer several ways to reach out to NVIDIA engineers and learn about new tools and techniques in the game development world. Be sure to bookmark our NVIDIA @ GDC 2013 events page to get the latest updates. In addition, don't hesitate to monitor our @nvidiadeveloper twitter feed for real-time news from the GDC floor.

In the last OpenGL SDK post I introduced the new SDK, now let me introduce our first new sample, “Simple Tessellation Shader”. As the name implies, it demonstrates the minimum parts necessary to use tessellation shaders in OpenGL. The sample only demonstrates tessellating the quad domain (rather than the triangular domain), and it shows two modes: one with a flat plane and one where the plane is wrapped into a torus.